The Poets' Wives (11 page)

1939

The long queue on Moscow’s Sophia Embankment consists almost entirely of women. A few have brought their children whose faces sullen with impatience at the hours they must spend in line are tempered by the drilled knowledge of the way they should behave, and above all how they must avoid the danger of idle speech. Because the children know as well as anyone that nothing opens the cell door like a prattling tongue. Perhaps it was such a careless tongue that made them come in the night for their father. But there are also children who have denounced their own parents. So not to put yourself, or them at risk, never talk in front of a child. Never talk in front of a stranger. That’s the rule.

Their clothing damp and spangled from the earlier fall of snow smells like old sacking and seeps into their collective misery. The woman who stands behind her reeks of onions and cheap scent. It inveigles itself into her senses and every time the queue shuffles forwards it follows and releases a new pungency. Of course there are always those who cannot hold their tongue whatever the danger and so one or two lean in closer to whoever will listen, to whisper no doubt that it was all a mistake and say they’re hopeful everything will soon be sorted, and they’ll speak of the letters they’ve written, the appointment with the Prosecutor’s Office they’re seeking, but which even if it is granted will seem like an eternity away in comparison to the mere three or four hours required of them now. She thinks it strange how everyone considers their own loss a mistake while instantly believing the guilt of others, no matter how fantastic the charge. On a tram she has even heard a woman proclaim with confidence that Stalin didn’t know what was done in his name and that if she can only get a letter to him everything will change. Foolish woman – if ever she wrote such a letter it would secure her a passage to the camps before the ink was dry on the page.

She looks at the forlorn children leaning in on their mothers’ hips, trying to find some fleshly cushion for their weary heads, but they are out of luck because none of the women carry anything surplus other than the weight of their despair. Their husbands are denounced as counter-revolutionaries and not to join in the denunciation is to embrace the shame spiralling about them and to risk their own arrest. And then what will happen to their children except that they too will be branded with the mark of the traitor and dumped in some far-off orphanage. No little red Komosol scarves for them, nothing hanging round their necks except humiliation and future lives lived in constant fear of exposure. She wonders why they brought them to this place and so subjected them to public gaze. Perhaps simply because there was no one willing to help look after them, perhaps because they didn’t want anyone to know where they were going. She is glad that despite everything her marriage brought her it never gave her children and she thinks there is enough suffering in the moment they take the man you love without adding their cries into the loss. And soon they will come for her. She thinks it is only a matter of time, sometimes is convinced that the delay is because they are enjoying the pleasure they derive from exerting their power, like a cat playing with a mouse.

She has come on the day of the month that the clerk deals with the letter M. Mandelstam. Osip Mandelstam. It makes her wonder about the enormity of the lists that this alphabetical arrangement has to be applied. The queue that slithers its way to the small, wooden-shuttered window falls into a silence disturbed only by the stamping of feet in vain attempts to generate warmth and the angry barking cough of an old woman. Occasionally at the window itself voices are raised but almost as soon as that happens there is the sound of the wooden shutters being slammed shut. She knows by now that the head that sits there does not enter into discussion and has no use for argument. The vastness of all their inner worlds, their loves and secret memories, the enduring intimacy between man and wife that is called marriage – all are drawn inexorably into this tiny space and this one head whose voice snaps at any hesitation as they give the prisoner’s name before handing over their little parcel or small amount of money. In return they receive only a scribbled receipt. Sometimes the window summarily shuts and although they go on standing they do not know if it will open again or if they must come back another day. There is a soldier on hand to deal with any recalcitrant or someone who loses possession of her senses and tries to make an appeal to this doorway into the void where their men have fallen. Fallen into a world that can only be imagined in the dark sleepless hours before dawn or partially constructed from the broken, reluctant witness of those who somehow manage to claw a way back. It stretches out behind the high walls of the prisons and into the snowy wastes far beyond the reach of love except through the tenuous, uncertain possibility of what they hold so tightly in their hands. Appeal to the window? As much point as howling at the wind.

The age has declared her a fool for thinking that anything that happens to an individual has any meaning. So she is on her own and soon there will be a knock at the apartment door and they will be there telling her to get dressed, all the time speaking in their calm, almost weary voices, unwilling to panic her any more than they already have. Speaking as if everything is matter-of-fact, a mere piece of administrative procedure, a question simply of having the right paperwork. She is supposed to be satisfied with the charade that everything is being done under correct legal process. It’s said that some sleep with their things already packed but they’ll always be told there is no need to bring so much, as if a safe return is guaranteed and imminent. A few questions, that’s all, and then everything will be done and dusted. Done and dusted, true enough, and she with all the countless others turned to camp dust and their remains scattered to the winds or buried in the frozen earth in the tundra’s unmarked graves.

As a weak wash of blue-edged light suddenly sheens a momentary definition into the greyness crowding in on her she sees the small drops of moisture beading the sable strands in the hair of the woman who stands in front. She can’t be more than thirty and still thinking it important to try to turn herself out well, to mend her clothes carefully so that it isn’t obvious except to someone who has stood close behind her over the space of three hours. They say that often the prosecutors tell such women that they are free to marry again even when their husbands carry a ten-year sentence. The price of divorce itself has been reduced. Perhaps these officials know the husbands will not be coming back, or if they do it will only be to enter the revolving door of re-arrest. Sometimes in love men have made their wives divorce them, broken off all contact just to give them a chance of survival.

That will never happen to them. They are together for ever, she believes. And then beyond. As she stamps her own feet she tells herself that he will not live long, that he isn’t strong enough to survive the camps, and she finds a kind of comfort in that. His heart is weak – already he has taken on the physical appearance of an old man so she shouldn’t be surprised by these few sable strands that streak the black sweep of this young woman’s hair. Once after his first arrest in
’34
for reciting his poem about Stalin and when they had been banished first to Cherdyn, then to Voronezh and compelled to become wandering beggars, she had offered him the thought of suicide but he had rebuked her with, ‘Life is a gift that nobody should renounce.’ He had the unfailing capacity to live life-glad in the moment and absorb fully whatever pleasure could be found despite their circumstances. Now it is the boarded-up prison trains and the weakness of his heart that will hurry him towards his death and she is glad his suffering will be short. What she hopes is that it will happen before fear is able once more to contaminate his mind, his poet’s mind that is the very best of him, and even now in the rigid order of the line she bridles with anger that such a man’s fate can be in the hands of those not worthy to breathe the same air.

But almost at once she is frightened by her anger because it above all things must be held in check. Her scream of rage can be heard by no one except herself. Fear is what they deal in. It is the only thing that exists in abundance. When everything else – food, clothes, bread itself – has shrunk to the margins, fear multiplies and flourishes. It is the currency with which anything can be bought, able to take someone else’s apartment, someone else’s wife, a reputation gained through a lifetime of exemplary service and sacrifice, and of course a life itself. It can even wipe away all memory and rewrite the past. In the Lubyanka the interrogator told Osip that he would experience ‘fear in full measure’. It is the only full measure they give so perhaps he expected his victim to be grateful. The fear is all around her now, coursing through the bowed heads and hunched shoulders, so real that it can almost be shivered on the skin or tasted in the mouth. She thinks again of the time she hesitatingly suggested they might together escape the fear, the terrible drawn-out waiting for the inevitable and his refusal to countenance it.

There is a short outburst at the window. Heads raise surreptitiously and lean out of the line to see what’s happening. An old woman is wailing, her cries fragmenting in jagged breathless shards. Her arms flail in the air and her hands pluck at her hair. Then the soldier has her by the shoulder, bunching up her shawl in the tight knot of his fist as he marches her away from the closed window. Passing along the queue they glance at her distorted face, its furrowed tracery of lines and creases that look as if they will crack open and allow her molten grief to pour out – the small parcel tied with string that she clutches to her heart confirmation that her child or husband no longer needs whatever it contains. Her wailing unsettles the waiting women and there is an unmistakable murmur threading its way along the length, momentarily linking them before it fades away almost as quickly into separate silences again. A child is asking a question of his mother but she hushes him and pulls his face into her side and holds him so close it looks as if she has an extra limb.

The line moves forward to occupy the vacated space. Somewhere behind her there is a whispered sibilance as if someone is praying but she cannot make out the words. She has no faith in prayer. The night before they came for Osip in the final arrest at Samatikha she had a terrible dream of icons. She thought it a bad omen and she was right because in the morning they took him away. That moment had played out and rehearsed itself so often in her head that at first it was as if she was acting out something already scripted for her. Everyone playing their allotted part. Two men in uniform and the doctor from the centre. Their knock at the door is soft, unthreatening. The two men complain about having to work over their May Day holiday. The doctor looks apologetic for his role in helping trapping them in Samatikha, which has been offered as supposed respite from their impoverished wanderings, but they realise at last that it was granted because it was too far from anywhere to effect an escape. He hangs back in his white coat, physically positioning himself at the edge of what’s happening as if some part of him – his conscience, what’s left of his self-respect – needs to be removed from the damaging reality of what’s taking place. They realise they’ve been sent to this dead-end to make it convenient for them when the appointed time arrived. But already she is thinking of preserving the poems and gives them the lie that all their papers are in the Moscow apartment when the truth is that many are still in Kalinin.

And this moment has played out so many times in her imagination but now the script slips from her hands and she struggles to play the part for which she has prepared herself. Osip gets dressed, she puts on her dressing gown and gathers up his things but hears the uniforms ask why she needs to gather so much stuff when he’ll be back after a few questions. There is a coldness opening inside her that paralyses her speech, weighs her limbs so that she has to sit on the bed as if turned to stone. Through the open door she can see the rear of the truck. In a matter of minutes it’s all over and when he asks her to come with him as far as the station they tell him it isn’t allowed. They’re taking him now and the script is dissolving in her head so that as they lead him away she gives him no proper words of farewell. This man whose whole life is built on the beauty and power of words she gives nothing of worth to carry in his head on the coming journey. Those words that have been prepared in her heart are frozen mute and as they put him in the truck she sits on the bed unable to move or cry out. She stays there as it pulls away and the noise of its engine roars in her ears long after the platitudes of the doctor who still lingers have faded into silence. Then when he quietly closes the door the frozen mask of her face is broken by the slow movement of her lips. Over and over, her lips reciting the poems, engraving them into her memory.

It is what she must do now. Right from the start of the process of making him a non-person they wanted the poems to disappear and she will not let that happen. Every remaining fibre of her being will not let that happen. And there is no place that is safe except her memory. The manuscripts sewn into cushions, hidden in saucepans or shoes – anywhere that might evade the searches – all of them vulnerable. Sometimes copies of the poems were given to others for safekeeping but who to trust? Always there are informers, sometimes because they believe they do good service for Mother Russia, others because they have been bought or pressured. Because the fist of fear has gripped their heart. Sometimes wives of those who were entrusted to hide some poems for them discover their hiding place and destroy them out of fear. There is nowhere they are safe but with her and that is why she must go on living, must stay one step ahead of them. ‘Let them forget about you, Nadia, make no stir,’ is the advice she was given after his arrest and so it is dangerous to come here with her pathetic parcel that her hands grip so tightly, as if at any moment she thinks someone will try to rip it from her grasp, but love compels her.